Volume 5, Issue 75: The Captain and the Glory

"He lied about the time of day while standing under a clock."

The book is out. People tend to like it, I think. I hope you have bought your copy. If you have not, there is no time like the present: Buy now. If you have already bought the book, you are encouraged to leave it a review on Goodreads or Amazon, or both. It helps. Thank you.

The day the book came out a couple of weeks ago, we had a little private launch party for friends and family at a little wine bar here in Athens. This has become a tradition for each book, ever since we had a launch party for How Lucky in May 2021 that, for most attendees, was their first time out at a public event since Covid-19 began. (A few of my friends are still hungover from that party.) It’s a nice bi-annual way to kick off what is always (and remains, right now) an extremely hectic couple of months, an opportunity to put on a suit and have a few drinks with friends in a festive atmosphere.

My dad and I got there early to help set everything up, and once we were done, we sat down at the bar for a little pregame beverage before everybody showed up. Next to us, just a few stools over, was an older couple, a man and a woman, who had been there for a while, drinking fancy cocktails and mostly looking at their phones. It looked like they had been there for a while, but they were pleasant enough. I nodded and smiled to them as I ordered, and they nodded and smiled back.

A few minutes later, the woman came over to us, sorta wobbily shaking her finger at me, but not in an unfriendly way.

“I finally figured it out,” she said. “My husband and I were trying to figure out who you looked like, and I got it at last. You look like Sean Duffy.”

My dad turned to me and raised an eyebrow. Who?

It took me a second, but then I remembered.

“Isn’t that the guy from The Real World who’s in the Cabinet now?” I said.

She looked at me strangely. “The what world?”

“The Real World,” I said. “The MTV reality show. The reality TV guy who runs the Department of Transportation now. Is that who you mean?”

She looked puzzled. “I don’t know anything about a reality show, or what The Real World is, but yeah, that’s him,” she said. “We decided you look like him.”

I chuckled. “Well, I don’t know about that,” I said. “I do know that we are equally qualified to run the Department of Transportation, though.” I heard her husband snort.

She looked at me, grimaced a little and walked back to her husband. They left a few minutes later, and my dad and I waved affably to them, and they waved back just as affably. My Dad turned to me.

“So who’s that person she was talking about again?” he said. “And do you look like him?”

Sean Duffy, indeed, is the current United States Secretary of Transportation, and, indeed, is a former cast member of The Real World, the sixth season, the one in Boston. (He had a crush on Montana but called Kameelah a “racist Hitler.” I mean, I think.) He also appeared on Road Rules: All Stars, featuring alumni of The Real World, where he met his future wife (and mother of their nine children) Rachel Campos, who was on the San Francisco season of The Real World, the (far more famous) one that had Puck and the late Pedro Zamora. She is now the co-host of “Fox & Friends” weekend of the Fox News Channel.

It should be said: I am pretty certain I don’t look like Sean Duffy.

I mean, we are both white guys born in the ‘70s in suits who still have their hair and are originally from the Midwest. (Duffy is from Wisconsin and went to college in Minnesota.) We both looked like dorks in the ‘90s and, I suspect, have both seen DC Talk and Michael W. Smith in concert. But I think you’ve got to be squinting pretty hard to see any sort of actual resemblance.

Or, more to the point: You have to watch so much Fox News that when you see a middle-aged white guy in a suit out in the wild, the first thing that comes to your mind is “Sean Duffy.”

It has been said that everything our parents warned would happen to us from playing video games ended up being what happened to them from watching Fox News. When I was a kid, I once played so much “Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out” that I thought my dad was starting to look like Piston Honda. This woman had watched so much Fox News that not only did she think I looked like Sean Duffy, she actually believed Sean Duffy such a megawatt celebrity that every person she ran into walking around the planet would immediately know who he was the second they heard his name.

Which is to say: You have to have Fox News Brain. I used to make fun of this condition, and believed it rare. I no longer do so.

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I was once a semi-regular guest on Fox News. I was on “Fox & Friends” to promote the release of God Save the Fan (barely missing the classic moment Brian Kilmeade hit a toddler in the face with a basketball), I had a near-weekly slot on Howard Kurtz’s “MediaBuzz” show (after appearing on his “Reliable Sources” on CNN previously), and I was the first-ever guest on Greg Gutfeld’s late night show “Red Eye,” a show I legitimately enjoyed both watching and appearing on. I can say without lying that I have smoked a cigarette while having a conversation on the streets of New York with Mike Huckabee. Life’s a rich pageant.

It has been nearly a decade since I was on the channel, however. Specifically, I haven’t been on since Donald Trump was elected. This decision can safely be classified as “mutual.” But I was probably kidding myself in the first place.

One of the many ways I have been fortunate in this life—and the way many of my friends have not—is that my parents never got sucked down the Fox News rabbit hole. We have all seen it. Sometimes this can be harmless, not entirely dissimilar to the way my dad used to have Rush Limbaugh on all day in his work truck because it didn’t have a tape player and Limbaugh was literally the only thing on every single AM station all day; Dad didn’t take it seriously, he thought of him as a crazy Royals fan, he was just a guy yammering on the radio like the rest of them, it was just noise. But sometimes—more often—this is weaponized, and can lead, has led, still does lead, to actual family estrangement. The number of friends who have told me how strained, or even broken, their relationships with their parents have become because of Fox News—not because of “politics;” because of Fox News—approaches triple digits. There is even a whole documentary about this, “The Brainwashing of My Dad,” by a filmmaker who struggled with what was happening to her noble, beloved World War II veteran father because of the channel. The documentary is more than a decade old.

I want to make it clear here that this is not inherently about “political differences.” There have always been political differences among family, and friends; I am a liberal from rural Illinois, “political differences” have been a constant in my life since I knew what politics even were, and it was never an issue. (If anyone was immature about these political difference growing up, it was certainly me.) The problem with Fox News is about its ability to shatter what we had once taken for granted and have now learned is invaluable, and impossible to reconstruct: A shared reality. Fox News has morphed from a right-leaning news network to a full-on propaganda machine, dedicated entirely to keeping its viewers scared, agitated and aggrieved at all times—and protected from any information that might disrupt the consistent, relentless worldview. It’s one thing to bend your coverage in one ideological direction. It is quite another to construct a specifically blinkered reality—to deliberately deceive.

We saw this a lot this week with the Musk-Trump fight—in which a terrifying battle between two of the most powerful, and increasingly insane, people on the planet who control billions of people’s lives was painted as a sort of “c’mon, bros, hug it out” episode of “Entourage”—but it was perhaps best illustrated by the collapse of the stock market in the wake of Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs.

As The New York Times reported:

At 11 a.m. on Friday, the S&P 500 was down about 4 percent, on top of a nearly 5 percent drop the day before.

On Fox News, Harris Faulkner opened her 11 a.m. newscast with the following pronouncement:

“President Trump is keeping another campaign promise. He tilted the global economy, and he’s done that to balance unfair trade and bring back manufacturing to the United States. And it’s getting response around the globe.”

While Faulkner was saying this, Fox News was missing a rather important piece of visual information: Its stock market ticker. Unlike every other network, including its Fox Business arm (save Newsmax, which actually only showed one real-time updated stock that day: its own, which had just gone public that week), Fox News had pulled the stock market ticker off the screen, because it was showing bad news. If they weren’t covering it, it’s like it wasn’t happening. And thus, for millions, it wasn’t. “The Daily Show”’s Michael Kosta (a University of Illinois graduate, by the way) had a great bit about this:

To talk to someone who watches Fox News obsessively—which is a number that continues to increase; last week, Fox News had 99 of the top 100 watched shows on cable news; it’s basically the NFL of cable news—is to speak with someone who simply does not share the same reality as someone who does not. This is also independent of political affiliation. I have friends who are considerably further right than I am but do not watch Fox News regularly; you can tell because their worries about trans athletes, migrant invasions and Ivy League schools approach zero. To watch the channel is to believe something is happening when it simply is not.

Other traditional news outlets and cable news stations—the ones Fox News was founded in opposition to, the ones it continues to thrive by insisting are the “mainstream media” despite having 99 of the 100 most-watched shows on cable news; this whole thing runs on pretending the people who have the most power and influence are part of some sort of aggrieved minority—are not perfect, far from it. They make mistakes, they have their own biases and blind spots, they chase headlines and flatten complicated issues, they’re often full of careerists and opportunists just like Fox News is. But they are not—they are in fact incapable of—creating alternate realities as a matter of institutional policy, as their reason for being. To purposely, obsessively exist outside the truth at The New York Times or CNN would be career suicide; to do so at Fox News is your path for promotion—or perhaps a spot in the administration. Jonathan Chait captured it well in 2021, when he noted how hard CNN, the Times and other supposed “liberal” outlets were (justifiably) hammering Joe Biden for the botched exit from Afghanistan:

Traditional journalistic norms may have weakened, especially in subjects like culture and sports, but they remain intact in most newsrooms, and especially in political coverage. Those norms enshrine a certain definition of objectivity that implicitly favors, in addition to social liberalism, hawkish foreign policy, deficit reduction, and bipartisanship.

Putting aside the ethics of the media’s approach, the political effect seems clear enough. Most Democratic voters will experience Democratic administrations as a mixed bag, at best. Republican voters, who mostly absorb the news through party-aligned media, will experience Republican administrations as an unmitigated triumph. The four-year experiment in Trump proved conclusively just how low the conservative media’s standards of truthfulness and competence are for a Republican president. If nothing else, Trump proved conservative media will support anything its party’s leader does.

“Even the most dishonest, incompetent, and scandal-ridden Republican presidency imaginable — which more or less describes the one we just had — will still have a media environment divided almost equally between scorching criticism and obsequious fawning,” Chait writes, adding: “In recent days, CNN and MSNBC looked a lot like Fox News, all hyping chaos in Afghanistan 24/7. That is the kind of comprehensive media hostility Trump never had to worry about.”

It has gotten considerably worse since then. We have now reached the logical endpoint of this approach for Fox News: Full-on North Korea Wins The World Cup, or, more vividly, people are getting their news from a series of Baghdad Bobs.

We used to mock this guy. Now we make him the Secretary of Defense.

I know that noting that Fox News has gone full-on propaganda is hardly breaking news, or some staggering insight. But sometimes you do forget, or you try to. And then a woman sees a white guy in a suit and thinks he looks like the man on her television, even though your dad looks absolutely nothing like Piston Honda. I’m not sure the way out of this mess. Because it is getting stronger. Fox News isn’t a news channel dedicated to scare and divide anymore. Now, for millions upon millions: It’s just the news.

BOOK STUFF UPDATES

It has been a busy few weeks. The big news this week was that Amazon Books picked Lloyd McNeil’s Last Ride as one of their 20 best books of the first half of the year.

As you can see from that number in the top lefthand corner, they actually chose it as the 11th best book of the first half of the year. That’s all books too, not just literary fiction books, or books with multiple references to the St. Louis Cardinals. That’s 11th total, two spots ahead of that new 1,200-page book about Mark Twain by the guy who wrote “Hamilton.” (The biography, not the musical.) Here are their top 20:

This was a nice thing to learn! I thank Amazon for this honor, I assume part of my award will to be shot into space as an inspiration to women everywhere.

So buy the thing if you haven’t yet.

Also! Next week we’re announcing the full-on book tour, which now features five different stops, starting June 26 at Left Bank Books in St. Louis at 7 p.m., with my friend and Seeing Red co-host Bernie Miklasz. Stay tuned! I would like to see as many of your faces as possible.

Here is a numerical breakdown of all the things I wrote this week, in order of what I believe to be their quality.

1. “Review: Skipper,” The Wall Street Journal. I reviewed Scott Miller’s book about baseball managers for the WSJ.

2. Tom Hanks Movies, Ranked and Updated, Vulture. Updated with The Phoenician Scheme.

3. Stephen King Movies, Ranked and Updated, Vulture. Updated with The Life of Chuck.

4. Scarlett Johansson Movies, Ranked and Updated, Vulture. Updated with The Phoenician Scheme.

5. Are the Braves Going to Be OK? MLB.com. The vibes are not great.

6. Toughest Calls on the ASG Ballot, MLB.com. That time of year again.

7. I Wrote a Quick Reaction Piece to the Tom Thibodeau News, New York. In the five years he coached the team, I’ll confess, I never figured out how to spell his last name right without looking it up.

8. So, What Next for the Knicks? New York. I say stay the course.

9. This Week’s Power Rankings, MLB.com. OK, so this is as high as I think the Cardinals are getting this year.

PODCASTS

Grierson & Leitch, Grierson and I discuss “Bring Her Back,” “Mountainhead” and “Pi.”

Morning Lineup, I did Monday’s and Wednesday’s shows.

Seeing Red, Bernie Miklasz and I dig in.

LONG STORY YOU SHOULD READ THIS MORNING … OF THE WEEK

“Do Patients Without a Terminal Illness Have the Right to Die?” Katie Engelhart, The New York Times. This piece about Canada’s Medical Assistance in Dying program, and the woman desperate to use it to release her (non-fatal, but quiet real) pain is deeply engrossing and will also wreck you.

ONGOING LETTER-WRITING PROJECT!

This is your reminder that if you write me a letter and put it in the mail, I will respond to it with a letter of my own, and send that letter right to you! It really happens! Hundreds of satisfied customers!

Write me at:

Will Leitch
P.O. Box 48
Athens GA 30603

CURRENTLY LISTENING TO

“Shoulders,” Big Thief. Big Thief announced a new album this week, coming in September, which is a reminder that I haven’t had a Big Thief song in this newsletter for too long now. You may remember: I remain obsessed with this band. New Big Thief album!

Remember to listen to The Official Will Leitch Newsletter Spotify Playlist, featuring every song ever mentioned in this section. Let this drive your listening, not the algorithm!

Also, there is an Official The Time Has Come Spotify Playlist.

Also, I was on CNN this week, talking about this Times piece.

Next weekend, I will be in Oklahoma with Real Storm’s Wynn Leitch, chasing storms. (From a respectful distance.) So subscribe to him for updates and photos from his new phone, which he just got for his birthday. We’re storm chasin’!

Have a great weekend, all.

Best,
Will